There’s no such thing as a race industry, David Brock tells race-industry leader

WHO IS HE? The Rev. Al Sharpton gestures as he takes part in a panel discussion during the National Urban League’s annual conference Friday in Philadelphia. About 6,000 people are attending the conference at the Pennsylvania Convention Center, which began Wednesday.

By Jon Cassidy | Watchdog.org

Q:Al Sharpton is a…

a) talk show host

b) civil rights activist

c) racial grievance-monger

d) all of the above

Wrong. It was a trick question.

There is no such thing as a racial-grievance monger. At least that’s what David Brock, president of the Media Matters sleaze factory, said Thursday.

The person Brock was talking to just happened to be the world’s most famous living stoker of racial resentments: Al Sharpton.

This would be the Al Sharpton who perpetrated the Tawana Brawley hoax, falsely accusing an assistant district attorney as one of Brawley’s attackers. The Sharpton who reportedly told an associate it was unimportant that Brawley’s claims sounded fake, because “you’ve got whites on blacks. That’s an easy way to stir up all the deprived people, who would want to believe and who would believe — and all (you’ve) got to do is convince them — that all white people are bad.”

The Al Sharpton who stoked the flames during the anti-Jewish race riots in Crown Heights in 1991.

“The president invited us to a meaningful dialogue, and unfortunately, with folks like Bill O’Reilly, who is a bigot, who accuses folks who they disagree with as being part of a racial industry. Frankly, the only industry based on race that I know about is this toxic talk radio.”

Regrettably, the camera wasn’t on Sharpton at the time, so there’s no record of him stifling a smile.

The triple salchow of hypocrisy is classic Brock: the call for substance instead of insults, immediately followed by an insult, followed by a mischaracterization of an opponent as guilty of mischaracterization, followed by the bald denial of a plain truth.

The display was more polished than Brock’s other remark on the show, which was just wrong in every particular, but not ironically so.

Here’s the quote:

“At Fox News, the fish rots from the head. So back in 1968, you had Roger Ailes, who’s now the Fox News chief, using the N-word prepping Richard Nixon for a public appearance. This was part of the Southern Strategy at the time, to attract Democrats into the Republican Party by stoking racial hate and prejudice. Then in 1988, you had Roger Ailes’ fingerprints all over the Willie Horton attack on Michael Dukakis.”

”There is no biological evidence to support the proverb,” he said. “Everything would decompose at about the same rate, though probably the stomach — or any injured part of the fish that led to its death — would start to smell first.”

Second, Ailes’ use of the ‘N-word’ was in the context of imagining a question from an audience member at a town hall meeting.

Third, Kevin Phillips‘ famous book, “The Emerging Republican Majority” wasn’t even published until 1969. The Southern Strategy was important in Nixon’s first term, particularly in his rhetoric on busing, as he worked to keep George Wallace out of the 1972 race. But Wallace ran in 1968, and swept most of the South.

Fourth, Brock’s use of “fingerprints” to blame Ailes for the Willie Horton ad is telling, as the famous ad was produced by a political action committee, not the campaign committee run by Ailes, not that the Horton ads were anything to be ashamed of.

There is a similarity between the Willie Horton ads and the Trayvon Martin case: the American people rejected the portentous interpretations of the bien pensant media.

In both cases, the media got hysterical over what the case said about race in America. And in both cases, large swathes of the country figured it said nothing much.

Trayvon Martin’s death was awful, but there’s no point in pretending it’s something that happens all the time. And Horton was a murderer who shouldn’t have been paroled by that rotten fish head of a governor, and it’s not racist to say so.

Jon Cassidy is the Houston-based reporter for Watchdog.org. He worked for six years as a reporter and editor for The Orange County Register after beginning his career at The Hill, broken up by a few years in South America working as a translator and English teacher. His work has been published by the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, City Journal, The American Spectator, Reason, The Federalist, Human Events, the Dallas Morning News, the San Antonio Express-News, and other publications. He was awarded the 2014 Robert Novak Journalism Fellowship. He is best known for his work in bringing to light a far-reaching admissions scandal at The University of Texas. You can reach him at [email protected]